Actually it's more in the first direction. I have slow viewed the Nemesis feature stream and read the texts that poped up while hovering above the operations. And if these are the only operations that exist (despite a few event based special ones) and in addition this is the release version (what is not clear!), espionage is way to weak to have a real (immediate) impact.
Especially Sabotage starbase is a real Joke. Read it by yourself
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i for myself would never use this. It's a massive waste of time and spy network resources. As i said, mabe this is not the final release version. But if it is, it's a shame.
In addition there is the random factor (what i think is fine, if assets would flat that out to have a bigger impact).
But for things like smear campaign, which is maybe the most important operation of all, its really bad that parallel operations aren't in the build anymore.
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"Lower them" is most likely relatively slow. So it's most likely easy to react to this if noticed. This will never propose a real threat. We need either parallel operations back or a massive bigger hit per operation.